Autobiography of a Bully
by Ate de Anguis
Summary: Even when Harry wasn't there, he was an inescapable part of Dudley's life. Years after they parted ways as teenagers and as Dudley grew into an adult, that was still true.


The Autobiography of a Bully

* * *

At seventeen and watching the house he grew up in fade in the distance, Dudley Dursley decided that if he was going to write an autobiography, he'd have to start it with _"I grew up with my cousin, the freak."_

It was not meant in malice, not now, but it had always been the defining factor of his life. To write a book about himself without Harry as a main character would be impossible, he thought. It would never be anything worth reading because first of all, Harry would be the only thing different enough about his life that people might pick such a book up, and secondly, without mentioning Harry, it would only be half a story. Even when his cousin was off at school and he'd been free of the boy's presence at last, his life had been shaped by the weird kid he'd grown up with.

_In a world where Harry's parents never died, I don't think we ever would have met._

Sometimes, he wondered if Harry felt the same about him. He'd just started to realize that he really hoped not.

* * *

At eighteen, and struggling through the final year at school that he should have experienced at seventeen but couldn't because of evil wizards and the world falling into chaos, Dudley figured that Chapter 2 of his autobiography should talk about his earliest memories if Chapter 1 was going to be a general introduction.

"_When I was five, I accidentally pushed Harry down the stairs,"_ he'd say, _"and my father gave me a cookie. I'm pretty sure it was a reward for getting through my first day of school and not meant as encouragement for my behavior. Probably."_

He'd been trying to forget Harry, honestly, but when his friends had all left him behind for universities and jobs and he was stuck with kids younger than him who wondered why he was still in school with them, he started feeling inferior for one of the first times in his life. And inferiority always reminded him of Harry.

He tried to lord being older than the other students over them, but they didn't seem impressed, and while he struggled to fill out applications for universities he knew didn't have a chance at being accepted into, he didn't feel too impressed with himself, either.

Chapter 4 would read, _"The first time I ever doubted that I could treat my cousin exactly as I pleased without consequences was when we were almost twelve, and he threatened to change my nose into that of a pig's."_ He wouldn't say that it was the first time he'd truly felt like he was less than his cousin even though it was.

* * *

At nineteen and starting his first year at a minor university where his father knew someone who worked in admissions, Dudley left a bakery and ran straight into a man with a robe.

"Watch where you're going!"

The man shrugged apologetically and continued on his way, and the way he was dressed suddenly hit Dudley.

"Wait a minute!" he yelled and grabbed the man's arm. "Wait—do you know Harry Potter, by any chance?"

The man looked only a bit startled. "Of course!" He sounded almost offended. "Doesn't everybody?"

"Is he—is he alive?"

Bemusement overtook the man's face. "Well, I would assume the _Prophet_ would have reported it if he'd died."

"_I was seventeen,"_ Dudley mentally wrote in Chapter 5, "_when I saw my cousin for the last time. He went off to fight a war as we went into hiding, and when the war was over, the only news we ever heard was that we muggles were now safe, and the man leading the army on the side opposite of Harry's was dead. No one told us about Harry himself, and my parents never bothered to ask. I kind of hope that if I'd been in the room at the time, I'd have thought to do it."_

On the nights when he stayed awake wondering if he could have gotten into a university without his father's aid, he was honest enough with himself to admit, _"I probably would have been too relieved to be going home to ask about Harry."_

* * *

At twenty-one, Dudley met the girl of his dreams.

The day he introduced her to his parents was the most awkward day of his life. He'd brought her home with high hopes because she was exactly what his parents had always hoped for: medium height, pretty, slightly plump but not fat, smart, and compassionate. And she loved him dearly.

"I'll admit I was hoping to meet Harry, too," she said with a smile at dinner, and the Dursleys all tensed because Dudley hadn't mentioned that while he'd grown up with Harry, their relationship hadn't exactly been friendly.

And as Dudley feared, his father became bright purple at the mention of his cousin. "That ungrateful, good-for-nothing piece of trash will NOT be mentioned here!" he shouted, and his parents had treated his girlfriend with nothing but contempt for the rest of the trip.

"I don't understand," she later whispered to Dudley. "What did I do wrong? Your parents _hate_ me, and for no reason. Are they…are they always like that?"

"Well, if you hadn't brought up the freak, everything would have been fine," he replied crossly, and while the response was more reflex insult to Harry and a reaction to his frustration with his parents, she didn't see it that way, and only a week later, she broke up with him.

"_Even four years since I'd seen him, and Harry was still ruining my life,"_ he added to his mental autobiography notes.

He still thought she may have been the girl of his dreams, but he would come to realize that that didn't mean he was the man of hers.

* * *

At twenty-three, Dudley told his father he didn't want to work for Grunning's, and his father went ballistic.

Dudley was called ungrateful, a burden, and a disappointment, but throughout the conversation, he felt a keen sense of detachment and wondered when he became his father's substitute for Harry.

The next week he brought home a girlfriend of two days with bright purple hair and a stud in her nose, and when his mother dropped a cake on the floor in shock and his father bellowed at him again, his girlfriend laughed in glee and dragged him to a small diner she knew for dinner.

Slurping spaghetti while the girl animatedly talked about some prank she once played on her colleague, Dudley added to his first chapter, _"Normalcy in our family died when Harry moved in, and for some reason, we all hated that."_

The relationship with the girl didn't last long—she wanted to travel the world and play in a band and cause a lot of trouble before she settled down—but they parted on friendly terms. Dudley and his parents didn't, and he didn't see them again for some years.

* * *

At twenty-six and happy as a general manager for a restaurant chain, Dudley met the man who would be his best friend for the rest of his life.

Evan was obsessed with saving the environment, would eat nothing at the restaurant but the salad without dressing since he couldn't see how things were prepared, was neurotic about where things were placed on the table, and first really talked to Dudley when Evan's boyfriend dumped his Coke over Evan's head and broke up with him. Loudly.

Dudley offered him a spare shirt he had in the back, and the guy just looked so pathetic and depressed that Dudley hung out at the restaurant bar for the rest of the night. He was a little leery of hanging out with a gay guy, but hey, he'd learned to accept multi-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, giants, and _wizards_—he pretty much figured that judging a guy on who he slept with was just ridiculous at that point.

It almost felt like an accomplishment to add something to his mental notes that _didn't_ directly concern Harry. When he was drunk enough one night to blurt this out to Evan, the man laughed and told him that he was drunker than he'd thought if Dudley thought his babbling about magic and owls and weird cousins and autobiographies made any sense at all.

When he was sober, Dudley told him about the weird cousin and autobiography (but not the magic and owls, obviously).

* * *

At thirty, Evan, Dudley, and a couple other friends were hanging out at a bar when Dudley saw his purple-haired ex walk in. She had green hair, and the nose stud was gone, and she was delighted to see Dudley again. She eagerly regaled him and his friends with tales from across the globe, and it felt like she'd been part of the group for ages.

Chapter 7 would be dramatic, Dudley immediately wrote in his head, laughing both at her wild stories and at the fact that he's once again writing his own. _"Gail whirled in and out of my life like a hurricane, and it seemed like magic the way she captured my attention. It wasn't, of course, but I think the only reason I was so open to her was that she reminded me of Harry. Not the energy she practically leaked or her animation because that had never been his style, but the way that sometimes she got that flat look that said she was really only physically there and her mind was safely hidden elsewhere and that defiant glint when she was looked down on. Mostly, she reminded me of the last two summers of with Harry, when we knew he'd been mourning and he'd been trying to keep us from seeing enough to rub it in his face."_

Dudley knew better this time, though, and he didn't push. This time, he wanted to be worthy of her trust.

* * *

At thirty-four, he realized that he'd lived longer without Harry than he had with Harry. Gail presented him with his first child, a boy, and he stared down in wonder and tried to figure out what had gone through the wizards' heads when they'd left a child as innocent as this to the mercy of a family like his.

"I swear to you," he whispered while Gail slept in the hospital bed beside him, "you will never grow up like him. Or like me. You'll be adored, but not spoiled. We'll have measures in place in case anything happens to us. You'll be allowed to be a freak or normal, but you'll never know disdain for those who are different."

His mother swept in shortly after that. It was only the second time he'd seen her in eleven years, the first time being a mere eighteen months ago. "_Now_ are you getting married?" she demanded. "Certainly I don't understand your devotion to _her_, but having a child outside of wedlock simply isn't acceptable, Dudley. What are we supposed to tell the neighbors?"

"_Make sure the lawn is perfect, Harry, or what will the neighbors say? Don't act like such a reprobate, Harry—we don't want the neighbors to think we tolerate such behavior. Mrs. Higgins next door saw you running from Duddykins last week, Harry—don't provoke him so much, or what will the neighbors think? Vernon, he did it again—on the roof this time. What are we to tell people? Such a freak…"_ Dudley thought he could probably devote an entire chapter to his mother's concerns about the neighbors alone.

"Mother, you're here to meet your grandchild," he snapped. "If you can't be happy about it, go join Dad in his game of Let's Pretend Dudley and Gail Don't Exist."

She sniffed but seemed to acquiesce. "What will you name him?"

"Sam," Gail interjected, apparently having woken up without either of them noticing.

"Samuel Harold Dursley," Dudley added.

"_Harold?!"_ his mother screeched in outrage, which woke the baby, whose cries preoccupied his parents too much for them to bother with a bitter harridan.

* * *

At thirty-six, Gail was pregnant again, and he thought his timing wasn't going to get any better than the day after he held his new daughter.

"Marry me?" he asked her quietly as they lay curled in their bed.

He'd put it off for years, and she'd said nothing either. He didn't know her reasons, but he knew his. He'd wanted desperately to invite his cousin, but in the five years he'd been thinking of marriage, he'd never figured out how, and maybe it was better to leave Harry Potter and his awful treatment of Harry as a part of his past.

"Oh," she whispered in dismay. "Well. I'm not saying no, but…here, let me hold Dahlia."

Sort of disappointed and sort of puzzled, he gave her the baby.

Gail took in a deep breath. "Right. So, the thing is, I would love to marry you. Really. But…there are a few things you should probably know. Well, a few things you probably should have known before Sam was born, I guess. So. Here goes..."

"_Chapter 8," _Dudley thought as she stumbled through an explanation. _"I fell in love with a witch. Now that's irony."_

"…and, uh, a few years ago, well, a couple decades, I guess, there was this wizard, You-Know-Who, I mean, well, that wasn't his real name, of course, it—"

Still caught up in his mental autobiography, Dudley automatically corrected her, "Voldemort, you mean." It isn't until there had been dead silence for nearly ten seconds that he realized what he'd said. "Uh. Wasn't it?"

"Dudley," she said carefully and with a glint in her eye. "How _exactly_ do you know that name?"

"Uh. You remember me telling you about my cousin? 'Cause, uh, if you'd still be willing to marry me, I'd really like to send him an owl. I mean, he could probably care less, but, yeah. I'd like him to know he's invited, I guess."

"Your cousin's a wizard," she said flatly. "You. Your parents, who hate me because of my hair's color, raised a _wizard_."

"Well, not very _well_, they didn't," Dudley pointed out. "They hated him. But his parents died because of that wizard, and he didn't really have anywhere else to go. I told you how we grew up."

"You told me he went to that school for _criminals_!" she hissed, trying not to wake the baby.

"That…was what we told people. Which should tell you something. He went to Hogwarts, though."

Her face went blank. "Oh, my God. I probably went to school with him. How could you not _tell_ me this?"

"You didn't tell _me_ you were a witch!" Dudley protested. "That seems a little more important, don't you think?"

But Gail seemed lost to her panic. "Oh, my God—what if I was mean to him! I was horrible in school! Or what if I fought him in the war? Or what—"

"Gail, whatever you might have done, I'm sure what I did to him was worse, and he probably couldn't care less what either of us does with our lives. I just thought it would be nice to invite him. It's not like his disapproval would stop our marriage. Anyway, he'd likely laugh himself sick at me marrying a witch."

Her lips twitched. "Well, if what you've told me is true about your family treating him horribly for being a 'freak,' and if that was really because of magic…yeah, it's pretty funny. Maybe it's okay, though. I mean, I probably didn't torment him. I don't remember a Harry Dursley anyway, so maybe he was someone who slipped past me."

"Oh, he wasn't a Dursley. He was related on my Mum's side. Harry Potter. I think he was pretty involved in the war, too."

He hoped Chapter 8 didn't end with his wife killing him or fleeing—her warring expression of incredulity and horror told him there was a good chance of one of the two.

* * *

Chapter 9 would have to be the wedding to the _actual_ girl of his dreams. "_Some weddings are perfect. I don't think I'd have known what to do with that, though. Dahlia wouldn't stop crying, the flowers never did arrive, the food was overcooked, neither of our parents were there, and it was the best day of my life. I couldn't stop looking at Gail, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. Harry, with a beautiful redhead, slipping in at the back of the ceremony, obviously uncertain of his welcome. The man who had been the boy who defined my life as a young man, back in it the year I turned 38, 21 years since I'd seen him last. He looked faintly bewildered, as if uncertain what he was doing there, and I couldn't blame him._

"_But then I had to turn my attention back to my new wife, the witch, my best man, Evan, beside me, and my son trying to find the wedding ring he was supposed to hand over. And it occurred to me that sometime in those 21 years, while he had remained the one to define my childhood, I had found something new to define my life by. It wasn't what I'd pictured growing up. It was even, dare I say it, a little abnormal._

"_Maybe even worth an autobiography."_

"Hey, Harry," Dudley greeted him while Gail was off laughing with old band-mates, her hair a bright pink to match her shoes, as she'd decided she would wear her colors at her wedding or nothing at all.

"Dudley," Harry greeted him, hands stuffed in his pockets, tentative half smile quirked on his face. "You, uh, you know she's a, um…"

Dudley quirked his own smile back. "Yeah, I know."

Nodding a little, Harry shuffled a little awkwardly. "Oh. Congrats."

Dudley smiled. "Good to see you, Harry," he said, and said sincerely, for probably the first time in his life.

"_I grew up with my cousin, the freak," _the autobiography would end. "_I did things I regretted because of it. Learned things I wished I didn't know about myself and about the world. Let it define my interactions with the world for years to come. I'm not proud of all of it._

"_I grew up with my cousin, the freak. I grew up with freaky things happening in my home and in my life. And because of it, I've grown into the kind of person who can one day sit down to dinner with my cousin, the man."_


End file.
